6. Sean - Broken Hero
Chapter six
Sean - Broken Hero
A fter Laurie vanished, Edie wasn’t the same. Her existence was bland. She tortured herself looking out the huge windows toward the bench where they had spent so much time enjoying each other. He wouldn’t be sitting there in the snow and frigid weather but sometimes she squinted her eyes and pretended to see him there. “Is this what a broken heart feels like, Jenny?” She had never known pain like this and prayed it would go away but it didn’t. Where did he go? Why did he leave? Was it because she refused him?
She spent hours looking through the album he gave her at Christmas remembering each snap of his camera lens. He dumped a box of golden and orange leaves over her head and caught them as they covered her. He sprayed her with a hose and, at just the right moment, captured the gorgeous prism of light that flashed rainbows and diamonds. His ability to frame his subject was uncanny and beautiful. She wrote letters to him for years as they continued to pile up inside her Hope Chest. She had no way to know where to send them but somehow, with each tear that dripped onto the paper as she wrote, she hoped he could feel her sorrow and how much he meant to her.
When school was out, she decided to spend the summer on the island. She would plant a garden, dig clams, catch fish, and try to remind herself to breathe. There was no reason to look across to the courthouse lawn. She could survive; she just didn’t know how. Her mother came to the island a couple nights a week unless she was traveling and her dad would zoom by in his fishing boat but would turn his head away even though she always stood on the shore and waved. She didn’t mind being alone and the island was her happy place. The huge trees overhead whistled their songs on the breeze and the gurgling melody of the sparkling river sang to her. The garden was coming along nicely and she kept the three-acre tract around the cabin looking like a park. Red ripe tomatoes waited for her and the salt shaker each afternoon, a snack she savored.
Despite the peace she felt on the island, there continued to be a hole in her gut but that was about to change. She had just wrapped herself in a big white towel after showering under the gravity-fed sun-warmed barrel of water. The ferry that transported most of the owners and guests from the mainland was being loaded by several people. Girls! There were girls! Perhaps she’d make friends and have some company. They rented the next cabin north of Edie’s just a five-minute walk through the woods. She hit the jackpot. Three girls, Sherry 13, Katie 11, and Rosie 8. She had been blessed with sisters. There was a teenage boy but she wasn’t interested in him except for being friends.
They became instant friends and Edie felt like she had a family. Edie helped them cook meals while the girls helped Edie work in the garden and help with keeping up the grounds. The girl’s parents worked every day so they were left to their devices. They played rock and roll music loud and proud, danced till they fell to the ground, baked in the brilliant sunshine, swam in the river, and at night they’d spread a blanket on the soft grass, listen to the crickets singing their love songs, and giggled as they awed at the incredible galaxies sparking their imaginations. They weren’t always the angels they pretended to be. The girls would steal a few cigarettes from their parents and they’d go into the woods to smoke. They’d puff, gag, and choke. It was grand. They would always chew a few blades of grass because someone said it would freshen their breath.
The entire course of her life was about to change. Looking back now, decades later, the dominoes were being stacked awaiting that gentle nudge that brings them all crashing down. It’s good that we can’t foresee our destiny. We may run from heartache but also miss the beautiful moments that are planned for our futures. She had few regrets.
There was another sibling in this family. Sean was their twenty-year-old brother who was a photographer in the military. Looking through pictures that he regularly sent to his little sisters, he was a specimen deserving of adoration. He was coming to the island for a two-week leave, and she fantasized about this handsome, Irish-born, world traveler. Lying in bed she imagined he would fall in love with her. She knew it was a silly dream and a distraction at best. Despite telling herself it couldn’t happen she made plans for what she would wear when she met him and how she would fix her hair.
A few days later she grabbed the binoculars and watched this tall uniformed god with a duffle bag slung over his shoulder make his way down the seventy-five-foot stairway to the ferry. Her heart began to race as her nighttime fantasy became reality. Giving the family a couple of days to reconnect, she paced the yard and worked the garden trying to occupy herself until she could go meet this dreamboat.
This story is long, heart-warming, heartbreaking, and too much to tell at this point but I’ll focus on the high points to help you understand Edie’s life over the next few years. Sean was handsome as any cover on a steamy romance novel. His six-pack looked like convoluted steel. He was solid and had as near-perfect a physique as she had ever seen. His curly chestnut hair and green eyes made her swoon. She shouldn’t have prayed that he would fall for her, but she did. God had more important things to do than answer her girlish whims of love but she cast her prayer to heaven every day. Be careful what you pray for. Something worked; before long they were hugging and kissing, exchanging letters and phone calls and her mother thought he might be good husband material. Did I mention how much Edie loves men?
Edie is my best friend and from my memory many years ago, she was too young for her mother to be talking about marriage. Edie was infatuated with Sean but I was concerned when she told me she might marry him. I would be heading off to college and I was concerned for this girl I considered my little sister.
At Thanksgiving, she watched him step off the plane, blowing her a kiss while walking toward her in all his grandeur. He spent a few days before leaving for a short stint in Vietnam to work on a film with John Wayne for the Army. She didn’t know if she was in love with him as much as the idea of him. When he wrapped his arms around her, kissed her, and said he loved her, it was nice but his affection didn’t affect her as Laurie had. She felt something was missing, a tenderness, gentleness. Instead, he was gruff although she knew he tried. He was a hero, outstanding in his military service, and a genius at his photographic craft. At the time, she had no clue what a tortured existence he’d endured at the hands of his belligerent cruel father.
On New Year’s Day, she was awakened by clanging and banging, the elevator making numerous trips and her parent’s voices talking quietly. Edie’s mother announced they had closed the bar until April and were going to Florida for the winter. “Mama, you can’t just leave me here alone. What will I do? What if I need something?” Her mother looked at her with disgust.
“You’re nearly grown up. You’ll be seventeen in a few weeks. It’s time you learn what life is all about.” They walked out the door and left her with no destination or a way to contact them. Shaken, she buried herself under her warm feather blanket and cried. She was used to being alone but now she was really alone. Sean and Edie continued to talk on the phone occasionally. It was expensive in those days so letter writing was their main communication.
She did her normal chores around the apartment, continued going to school, and invited some of us girls over for a slumber party a couple of times but she was lonesome and felt abandoned. One night five weeks after her parents left she was watching TV when the door to the apartment crashed open. There stood a big-as-a-bull and twice as mean guy from her high school. His eyes were glazed and drool ran down his chin as he staggered toward her.
The attack was brutal; she wasn’t sure she would escape. He didn’t accomplish his attempt at rape before she lured him to the top of the stairway and kicked him down three flights of stairs. The police took him to jail after he had been treated for contusions and a broken leg. She was so terrorized, that she could barely speak as the doctor sewed a gash on her cheek and breast.
Later that night, Sean called and she completely fell apart. The next morning there was a light tap on the door. Sean had traveled all night to come to her. Refusing to let her stay alone, he insisted she go back to New York with him until her parents returned. He wanted to protect her but the idea backfired into a life-changing event. Within a week, her parents were home, ordering their return to Illinois, planned their courthouse wedding, and sent Edie out of their lives and back to New York. Life was never the same. She wondered how her mother could just give her away without a thought. It seemed strange he would be so willing to marry her on such short notice. Of course, she was too young and na?ve at the time to do anything without her mother’s approval.
After the wedding, she lost her virginity to Sean in a violent attack. Edie cried so hard when she told me about it. She was traumatized but her mother had told her, ‘You have to keep your husband satisfied.” She instinctively knew it shouldn’t be that way but she was stuck with the consequences. She was a small-town country girl and was terrified of being in New York City. Things were so different, so rushed, so demanding. She rarely left the apartment unless she was with Sean except to go to Bloomingdale’s where she worked. She rode the subway with her landlord in the mornings into Manhattan from Queens. She felt safe there and got a degree in interior design that served her well later in life.
Sean was so gifted at his photography job and could have had an incredible career with the military. Everything he did was seen through the eyes of an artist. He created masterpieces that still, after decades, hang in significant galleries. His photos were emotional and moving creating an aura of beauty for things that shouldn’t be considered beautiful like gears and tools. She didn’t realize that was his attempt to create beauty because his life had been filled with ugliness and that was his way of showing love.
One year later Sean was sent to Vietnam for four months to photograph top military brass for recruitment purposes. Edie decided to return to Illinois while he was gone instead of staying alone in New York. She drove her VW Beetle for sixteen hours and slept in her childhood bed while her parents were again basking in the Florida sun for the winter. I was so excited to see and talk to my friend Edie. I had a feeling perhaps she would tell me the truth about her life and she did. She was happy to be away from Sean for a while. A feeling of freedom washed over her like a gentle wave. She didn’t have to worry if he would come home in a fit of rage and hurl his dinner plate at her because he didn’t like the food she prepared or lock her outside in the snow without her shoes and coat. She was eighteen and trapped.
It would be unfair to Sean if she didn’t acknowledge some good times but he was as volatile as a vile of nitroglycerin. His sexual drive seemed unnatural, his temper uncontrollable, and it took little to set him into a tirade. Each morning before going to work he disabled the TV so it wouldn’t work. He didn’t want her watching soap operas to get ‘fancy’ ideas about marriage. “That’s not real life,” he told her, “so get used to the way things are.” Physical and mental abuse became normal to her though she had a longing for the gentleness she had experienced in her short life, from Carl and Laurie. This was her life and she would make the best of it because there were no other options open to her. When Sean came back from overseas, she would be there waiting. She prayed they could make it work more lovingly and with less drama.